Over the course of four weeks in October and November, DVD Talk ran four individual surveys asking people about their shopping experiences at each of the industrys four leading online DVD retailers:
800.com, Amazon.com, Reel.com and DVDExpress. A total of 3,445 surveys were completed.

The survey results opened insights into the power and success of coupons on the Internet, the important role of prices, and the individual strengths and weaknesses of the leading online DVD e-commerce companies.

Thanks to everyone who took this opportunity to voice their opinions about shopping online for DVD's, we hope you will find these results as facinating as we do. Also a special thanks to i-OP the company who helped make this survey happen with thier new cutting edge Java-based survey technology

Key findings:

Reel.com has emerged as the leading e-commerce site for DVDs. It appears that they have built this leadership by focusing on coupons and pricing. This position has also been re-enforced by a strong selection and pre-order availability. But customer support is also important for customers, and here Reel.com appears to be very weak, especially compared to companies such as Amazon.

In the
selection process for DVD movies, Reel.com, DVD
Talk and 800.com are the most visited locations

Not only
are many customers visiting Reel.com, those who
did were far more likely to consider this site as
their favorite for DVDs than customers visiting
other DVD e-commerce sites

Coupons
and price were important elements in influencing
the selection of favorite web sites

We asked
Reel.com customers how often they used coupons
when they purchased DVDs -- almost half of them
always used coupons. 77% of them also said that
the availability of coupons was very important in
determining when they purchased DVDs

We also
found that DVD customers are extremely sensitive
to prices -- we found that the upper limit of the
acceptable price range for a mainstream DVD movie
to be only around $18.50

The third
most important area for customers for DVD site
was selection -- Reel.com and DVD EXPRESS were
considered better than 800.com and Amazon in this
area

Pre-orders
were also considered important to most customers

In the pre-order
area, Reel.com was perceived as much better than
other sites

As a
result of leadership in coupons and other areas,
we found that Reel.com customers were the most
loyal

To estimate this
loyalty, we asked customers if they would still
buy from a site even if they could get the same
movie from another site for $1 less. Reel.com
customers were more likely to buy at that site
even at the slightly higher price.

But, when
asked what was important after price, customer
service and speed of delivery ranked very high
among our respondents

A
surprising number of customers experienced
problems with delivery of DVDs from Reel. com.
Amazon appears to be doing the best job in this
area

A quarter
of all Reel.com's customers have had to return
products back to the company -- much higher than
any other company

And those
who returned products to Reel.com found it more
difficult than with other vendors

In part,
due to this, Reel.com customers had to use
customer support call centers much more than
other customers -- 2.5 times greater than Amazon
customers

And
overall satisfaction with Reel.com call center
was lower than all of the others. Amazon had the
highest level of customer satisfaction with their
call center

this summary was
prepared with the support of i-OP, a company that is creating
powerful new ways to listen to customers.